Hello, Homer

Even at first sight of Homer’s studio, his deliberate isolation is apparent. The original structure, protected by a small white fence, was built so that no windows faced the road. “If you think of it as a summer colony in the 1890s, that alone is really turning your back on the public,” says Tom Deneberg, the former Portland Museum of Arts chief curator who worked on the restoration for five years. “It’s all symbolic. Today, if you have a little money, you live in a gated community or have video cameras. In Homer’s day, it was as easy as creating a little social distance between yourself and the public.”

It’s tough to blame Maine’s Portland Museum of Art gift shop for capitalizing on the fact that American landscape artist Winslow Homer had a nice mustache. There, after viewing Weatherbeaten—one of Homer’s most famous late paintings—you can purchase your very own “Winslow Whiskers” for $3.95. They are adorable, as novelty gifts tend to be. “I bought some for my nephews,” the museum’s public-relations director said while showing me Homer’s newly renovated Prouts Neck studio, a project that cost about $10.5 million and took six years to complete.

As a frugal man whose four favorite words were said to be “Mind your own business,” Homer would have likely disapproved of the whiskers, and the costly renovation, as well as the fact that, starting Tuesday, September 25, small batches of museum-goers will be able to take a jitney to the small coastal community where he settled in 1883 and tour his studio. (Prior to the renovation, curious wanderers would simply poke their head into a modified version of the cottage). After all, the lifelong bachelor’s desire to be isolated from the outer world is what originally drove him to this jagged-rocked Maine-coast peninsula. To remain there unbothered, he hoarded supplies, including six kerosene stoves, cases of fruit, barrels of cider, and most tellingly, 144 pairs of socks. Indeed, he worked hard to spin a tight cocoon from which he created his late seascapes collection, among many other masterpieces. According to John Wilmerding, a professor emeritus of American art at Princeton University who has visited the studio both before and after its renovation, these seascapes get down to nature’s essence. “A lot of that sensibility shows in this very humble, un-ostentatious, withdrawn environment.”

In that vein, the Portland Museum has also elegantly maneuvered an exhibition of Homer’s works to celebrate the opening of his studio. “Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine” opens September 22 and will showcase some of the artist’s 35 major oil and watercolor paintings created during his 27-year tenure in Prouts Neck. “For a regional museum to bring together these great masterpieces is no easy feat,” says Wilmerding.

Weatherbeaten will run through December 30. Tours of the studio are already pre-booked through October.